Orange poaches Carphone's AOL veteran

Orange has poached Carphone Warehouse’s customer services boss to fill the same role at the operator.

Jackie O’Leary, who joins next month, had been predominantly running the customer services business at Carphone’s broadband business, AOL.

She will now look after all of Orange’s customer services, covering both mobile and - arguably more importantly - broadband. It is CEO Tom Alexander’s first senior appointment since he relaunched the company earlier in the year.Alexander cited O’Leary’s 20-year experience with AOL and described her task as critical ‘in Orange’s ambition of becoming the UK’s best-loved communications brand’.

She will be working closely with Orange’s call centres in North Tyneside, Darlington and Plymouth. Alexander previously said he would remove Orange’s overseas call centres, bring all operations to the UK.

Orange’s customer service problems have been vast on broadband, consistently coming at the bottom or near the bottom of surveys from the likes of Which? and uSwitch.

O’Leary arrived at Carphone as part of the £370m acquisition of AOL in October 2006.

She had been with AOL for over a decade previously, and was immediately heavily involved with fixing the customer service crisis at Carphone’s existing broadband business, TalkTalk.

She has also worked for T-Mobile, Vodafone and O2 and France Telecom across Europe.

She has extremely strong credentials in the market, but continued to work for Carphone from AOL’s base in Waterford, Ireland. She is understood to have worked at Carphone’s HQ in Acton for two days a week.

Her new title at Orange will be VP of Service. The previous incumbent of the role, Mike Hughes, has been moved to ‘VP of Transformation’, involving executing Alexander’s new organisational structure.